Nobody asked after the Dahomey folk, though the family searched high and low for Ochun who did not normally leave home just like that.
Then, one night, it happened to Aya too. She tried to lie down and sleep there, in her father’s house, but she couldn’t lie down.
Midnight boomeranged ten thousand times in the space of a second, and night slammed shut to stop day from even beginning to point out a path to the sky’s rim.
Ensoulment is never imagined as the cold terror that it is.
Snuffling, Aya packed before she knew that she’d done it.
She fled to be born. She fled to be native, to start somewhere, to grow in that same somewhere, to die there. She didn’t know just then that she wasn’t quickening towards home, but trusting home to find her.
Only Aya was to find the three Dahomeians. Only Aya was to discover what had become of Ochun and Echun. She found Ochun with her waistful of silk scraps, Echun with a guarded smile and drawers full of stubborn prayers. But by the time Aya found the Dahomeians, and by the time she found Ochun and Echun, she could not recognise them, and she did not know them by name. That is what aspects are like; they change.
6 let no pebble smile
Amy Eleni said dinner at her house was stressful. We hung around in her room and ate crap most of the time, but Amy Eleni only ever invited me to dinner once. Her parents’ house smells of church incense and is full of things like jade vases and brushed suede. It’s the sort of place where you periodically flinch, not because anyone’s raised a hand to you, but because you realise that there are things on display that many would consider worth more than you.
At the dinner table, Amy Eleni’s parents sat opposite us and said little. The silence wasn’t unfriendly, just the kind of silence that happens when there’s nothing new to say. The food was dizzying: lamb cooked in three different ways and spices; cracked wheat; meatballs; hot flatbreads. But Amy Eleni’s dad was the only one who dared to eat much. The problem was Despina, Amy Eleni’s mother, who sat completely still with a brocade shawl draped around her sharp shoulders and let no food pass her lips. Amy Eleni’s father sopped up the quiet with one arm around the back of Despina’s chair, humming more appreciatively the deeper he got into his heaped bowl. How could he eat?
Despina is so thin that you stare helplessly at her. And she knows that you can’t believe it, and she drops her heavy eyelids with a smile. Despina is thin like being naked in public — you can see the beginnings of her teeth stamped in her face; you can see them through her skin when her mouth is closed. Despina is like a star, of both the fifties film and the sky varieties — untouchable, but not beautiful. She is startling in a way that really doesn’t exist any more, only able to be present because she is preserved, delayed. Her eyes are Amy Eleni’s, but brighter. Her hair is Amy Eleni’s, but lighter, under better control, pulled back into a smooth wavy fringe and ponytail. Her skin is darker, dark gold.
From across the table Despina stapled our stomachs with a tranquil gaze.
‘Do please have some more of that, I see you like it,’ and so on.
She had a small plate in front of her that stayed completely clean throughout dinner, though she watched Amy Eleni’s plate and thoughtfully sipped at water.
Pudding was caramelised pears; golden, sticky, sweet agony to smell, greater agony to discard after a couple of nervous pokings with our spoons. Amy Eleni and I didn’t look at each other. In some of Chabella’s apataki, the Orishas intervene to stop a mother from ‘eating her child in spirit’. I wanted an Orisha to come and smite Despina so that I could get on with my caramelised pears.
After dinner, as soon as was decent, Amy Eleni and I went down to Whitechapel and got chocolate rugelaches at Rinkoffs. We sat on railings and stuffed doughy biscuit and chocolate, talking and spraying each other with food, seeing who could be the most disgusting.
I asked her if dinner was always like that, or whether it
was just because I was there. Amy Eleni clutched her hair and pulled at it. ‘Oh, truly. I’m not mad! I’m not mad! I don’t want to die!’
‘There’s someone inside of me, and she says I must die! Jesus!’ I said.
‘Christmas dinner is always particularly jolly at the Lang household,’ she said, and laughed so hard that she accidentally pushed rugelach out of her nostrils.
Once my sets are over, Chabella, Amy Eleni and I stay at the café, relocating to the furthest circle from the stage. In the shade Amy Eleni and I snigger at the newest style of bad recital. A lot of the poems are about willow trees. A couple of the poems Amy Eleni and I debate back and forth over; they are so overwrought that they have to be po-faced comedy. Unexpectedly, Chabella likes one of them, says that that particular poet’s representation of the tree manages to both promise and conceal dark things. She compares the structure to a highly condensed version of the first simple but strong poem she ever learnt in German, Goethe’s ‘The Erl King’, a poem that neither Amy Eleni nor I can remember. We shut up and drink our Cuba Libres. Someone rests a hand on my shoulder; I turn and a sweet-faced, curly-haired girl — maybe a Hispanic Cuban, maybe a girl that I should know — leans across the table to kiss Chabella, nods apologetically at Amy Eleni and crouches down beside my chair to talk to me.
‘I loved your singing,’ she says. Before I can thank her she continues, ‘And I saw your Mami, and your name on the programme. And I remembered you.’
She smiles at me, shushes Mami, daring me to guess who she is. Her accent is strong, so she is recent, and I want to help her out; I try not to sound too English when I reply, but I can’t help it — she isn’t family.
‘I remember your face, I think,’ I say, hesitantly.
‘I know yours,’ she says. ‘We used to play together before you left Habana. Then when you left, our mothers kept swapping photos of us. In your photos you were always in jeans. We sent you a photo of me on my quinceanera, but I remember we didn’t get one back from you because you said you didn’t want a quinceanera; you insisted that turning fifteen was no big deal, that you didn’t ask to be born. That made me laugh a lot.’
I keep looking at the girl, but I still have no idea who she is; Chabella has flashed me so many photos of Cuban girls that I doubt I could even individually identify my cousins by name. I smile to buy time, but she throws her hands up and tells me that my time is up.
‘It’s Magalys Pereira-Velázquez,’ she says, and I smile open-mouthed to show that I am glad and to hide that I still don’t have a memory to put her face and her name together with. ‘The last time we saw each other, your parents were having a leaving party,’ Magalys says, and then I do remember; I remember that she was the girl from Vedado. Magalys is the girl who was under the table with me when the woman came and sang to us. Suddenly I am frightened that she will somehow remember that I didn’t help her. I hold my arms around myself to hold Magalys away.
Chabella is fretting to call Tomás and make sure that he’s safe and snug and asleep. I point out that if he is asleep she’ll wake him, but she holds out her hand for my phone. Her lip quivers and I lose my nerve. Seconds later she is cooing down the line at Tomás. The only people still sprinkled around the café tables are couples or prospective couples with their voices set to murmuring and their faces close together.
Amy Eleni has to teach tomorrow, but, late as it is, she stays and smokes and is unusually low on comments, and I know then that her break-up has been hard on her. I can’t stop glancing at the phone number that Magalys soft-pencilled onto a napkin before she left, but I don’t want to talk to her because the memory of the leaving party is mine and she doesn’t belong in it. Magalys has so much more of Cuba than I do; she proves it by walking up with her easy smile and strong accent.